i just now realized what you were trying to say here took me a few days but i got theremockturtl wrote:I can build cinnamon in a clean sid, so I think something from experimental must be the problem. (Note: it needs cinnamon-control-center from github.)
ZZ, I think there will be some pain after the thaw, when cinnamon migrates to jessie and everyone's pinning is different... for now `dpkg --force-overwrite` will override sid's cinnamon with a local or linuxmint.com version.
lmde is indeed in a strange situation regarding cinnamon: is at the same time upstream (cinnamon comes from packages.linuxmint) and downstream (cinnamon is also available in debian proper) (and this is something i don't recall happening anywhere else)
this opens a all new can of worms specially for users running non-standard setups (lmde tracking testing, tracking sid, non-default pin preferences)
for users staying in the update-packs flow (and keeping the standard preferences file) i don't see a major problem (not yet): even if cinnamon is updated to a higher version in debian, it won't overwrite the version available in the mint repo.
for the others (the non-standards) we might see (and most probably will because cinnamon is kept fairly updated in debian) updates from the mint version to the debian version.
is this a problem? no by its own (although i don't know if the debian cinnamon is built with the same options as the mint package) but some additional packages that mint offers (thinking about cinnamon-themes for example) are not in debian and this could 1) cause a loss of functionality and more important 2) make the upgrade path from packages.linuxmint to debian and back less clean and prone to issues.
jessie is going to be really interesting in a lot of ways